That is also the premise of one of the stories in Asimov’s I, Robot. Human operator did not say the command with enough emphasis, so the robot went did something incredibly stupid.
Those stories did not age well… Or now I guess they did?
What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.
Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.
You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.
Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.
Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).
Worked pretty well for me in the past.
I’ve been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.
Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don’t really use it though).
I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don’t care and don’t want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.
Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.
But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.
XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)
Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)